Remember those mittens I was wearing in Denver?

Here’s the pattern!

I knit these mittens a couple of years ago, pre-blog, when I was on a big cable kick – I really wanted some cabley texture that wouldn’t be annoying to wear on the palm of my mitten. The tighter cabling and purls on the cuff draw the fabric in to keep the snow out.

This pattern calls for one skein of Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride Worsted, but any heavy-ish worsted yarn should do. The mittens are knit tightly (using US 6 needles) for extra wind-battling power during those long, cold winters.

I’ve been finessing the top decreases over the past couple of days, so the mitten photo above isn’t 100% accurate. The pattern as written is most similar to the left mitten above – all of the decreasing issues in the right mitten have been fixed.

Yay for mittens!

We’ve returned, finally! Colorado was great, but so very dry. I felt like kindling the whole time I was there, and I’m just beginning to moisten back up now. Houston is good for something, and that’s humidity.

There’s so much to do in the Denver vicinity – we spent some quality family time in the city, then did a little CO college town tour (Boulder and Fort Collins) and checked out Rocky Mountain National Park. The roads to the good, high peaks were closed for the season and we weren’t really prepared for some hardcore mountain hiking in the snow (and wind). But we did have an encounter with some of the cutest wildlife around.

Hello, hearty magpie, you’re so cute and plump for the winter!

It was cold enough to skip past the fingerless mitts straight to full mittens.

Brrr! I’m also wearing my Sarcelle and handknit socks. I grabbed a few pairs of socks, not realizing that I’d wear the Mad Color Weaves every night as house socks (Rob’s brother’s house was COLD). My favorite pair was the Hederas that Silja sent me for Sockapalooza. I originally thought they were a wee bit snug, but they fit perfectly and stay up the best out of any of my handknit socks. Note to self: knit socks slightly smaller in the future!

We got to meet our almost-four-month-old nephew on the trip, which naturally meant that I got knitting.

Remember my great spin-out this past summer? I knit these out of this Spunky Eclectic yarn. The yarn was crazy uneven, but they didn’t turn out half bad! The hat is based on the kittyville Little Devil hat, and the thumbless mittens (hee!) are sort of based on the Baby Mittens pattern here. I may have done a half-assed job writing down the mitten pattern, so I winged knitting them on the plane. In addition to being crazy uneven, the handspun changed gauge as I knit with it, from worsted-ish to dk-ish. I’m still pleased at how well the hat and mittens turned out, and they almost fit baby Isaac. Yay!

I leave you with the strangest thing we saw on our trip (well, besides the townies singing karaoke in an Estes Park bar):

This gigantor sculpture sits outside the Denver Art Museum. Um, Denver is a dirty, dirty city and needs a good sweeping?